Middle East

Jan 6, 2007

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BOOK REVIEW
Operation bungle Iraq
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia

machines. The CPA official in charge of the Iraqi stock exchange conjured up fancy ideals of computerization and new securities laws when the need was for blackboards. In the words of one Iraqi broker peeved at the non-practicality of it all, "Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia." (p 232)

The CPA's public relations office "never conceded a mistake and

spun failures into successes to the point of absurdity". (p 129) It ran the new Iraqi Media Network as a crude propaganda tool with the logic that "we're paying for it, so we can decide what airs". (p 134)

Chandrasekaran delves into the murky world of fraudulent private security contractors who were subcontracted by the CPA in Iraq and earn inflated profits using false invoices. Some of them collected weapons seized by the US military and shipped materiel out of Iraq for sale. The weaponry they possessed and used was legally verboten. "They were above the laws of war." (p 146)

Throughout his stint in Iraq, Bremer insisted that power shortages would end soon, but it never happened. Prewar US statements hid the enormity of Iraq's infrastructure failure by positing that oil revenues could finance reconstruction. Until the Green Zone itself began to be hit by insurgent attacks, the CPA dished out the myth that "the country was becoming safer by the day", discrediting itself as an entity wallowing in make-believe. (p 179)

Iraq's health-care resuscitation was in the hands of James Haveman, who wasted previous resources on an anti-smoking campaign instead of raising awareness on preventing childhood diarrhea and fatal maladies. According to one American pharmacist, "Haveman and his advisers really didn't know what they were doing and viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack." (p 216) The CPA's health measures were evaluated by the Iraqi minister of health as "a fool's errand". (p 219) The pity was that men like Haveman were untouchable by virtue of their ties to the Bush administration.

The Pentagon and the CPA were blind to the dangers posed by disaffected Iraqi nuclear scientists after the fall of Saddam and treated the matter as part of the de-Ba'athification purges. Parallel State Department attempts gently to reorient the scientists were blockaded in Iraq by fellow Americans. The Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq Survey Group searching for elusive weapons of mass destruction even threatened Americans aiming to achieve a soft landing for the scientists. One American general commented, "The CPA's missteps cost us one very valuable year." (p 289)

CPA officials assumed that change could be brought about simply by drafting laws, as it happens in the US. Bremer learned very late in the day that conceiving an inanity "in Washington and ramming it down the throats of Iraqis didn't work". (p 41) United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi's assistant told Chandrasekaran that "the story of the Americans in Iraq is of missed opportunities". (p 246) One pensive CPA member recalled after Iraq was "handed over" to an interim government, "We were so busy trying to build a Jeffersonian democracy and a capitalist economy that we neglected the big picture." (p 276)

Chandrasekaran perorates his remarkable book of discoveries with the reality-check that Iraq did not require "a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant". (p 290) One is left wondering whether there was a method in the madness and if the chaos that the CPA's ineptness bequeathed to Iraq was intentional. This book goes a long way in shattering the belief that the US is a benign hegemon resurrecting broken countries with finesse. That Americans can be blunderbusses despite the brouhaha is being borne out by the unspeakable human tragedy of Iraq.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A Knopf, New York, September 2006. ISBN: 1-4000-4487-1. Price: US$25.95, 320 pages.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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